


Synthesize: A Tryptich

by Shadaras



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23301394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/pseuds/Shadaras
Summary: Sylvia Tilly settles intoDiscoveryand finds her friends.
Relationships: Airiam & Keyla Detmer & Joann Owosekun & Sylvia Tilly, Joann Owosekun & Sylvia Tilly, Paul Stamets & Sylvia Tilly
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34
Collections: Space Swap 2020





	Synthesize: A Tryptich

**Author's Note:**

  * For [facethestrange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/facethestrange/gifts).



Sylvia had been on _Discovery_ for about a month when Joann sat down across the table from her at breakfast and said, “So, when’s your birthday?”

She’d just stuck a big forkful of scrambled eggs into her mouth as Joann said it, so Sylvia couldn’t respond right away, but her eyes clearly betrayed her confusion enough, since Joann grinned and leaned forward, arms braced on either side of her own fruit-loaded porridge. “Yes, I could look it up in the database, but where’s the fun in that?” she said, and, well, Sylvia could see her point. She wouldn’t want to look something like that up either, if she didn’t need to.

She swallowed her eggs and took a drink of water, just to be sure nothing would be caught, or stuck. “Once you translate it back to Terran Standard?” she asked, not that she was expecting anything else, and Joann nodded as she took her own bite of porridge. Sylvia mentally checked the math again—she preferred remembering her birthday by Federation Stardate, which was just enough of a different system to be annoying—and then said, “June 21st.”

Joann’s eyebrows raised. “Solstice baby?”

“I guess?” Sylvia shrugged and poked at one of the peppers mixed into her eggs. “I mean, I was born on a Starbase, and my mom got posted enough places that I didn’t think about it much. When I was a teenager, sure, we were on Earth, but—” She let go of her fork in time to keep her futile gesticulation from potentially catapulting breakfast around. “I had to learn the association.”

“Well, grow up with farmers and you learn to care about that kind of thing a lot.” Joann smiled a little, and Sylvia tentatively smiled back. Then, before Sylvia could figure out if it would be okay to ask about that, Joann offered, “My birthday is October 8th, so I’m a harvest baby.”

Sylvia took another bite of her eggs, trying to figure out what to say. Joann didn’t seem to mind that, fortunately; she keeps eating her food, quiet but not seeming annoyed, which is a relief. Sylvia’s seen Joann around—the lieutenant made a point of greeting her when she came on-board, saying that she wanted to be sure to know all the new women, especially the new tech-nerdy ones like Sylvia—but Joann’s bridge crew and Sylvia, well—

Sylvia’s just happy to be on _Discovery_ at all, and she loves the engineering labs, but it does make it hard to talk to anyone who isn’t also taking engineering shifts. Even so, Joann has made an effort, so Sylvia wanted to meet her there. As she poked eggs onto a slice of toast, she admitted, “I have no idea what harvesting means other than what you learn in schools and books, but I’m pretty sure that it’s hard?”

Joann laughed, eyes crinkling up until they’re hidden in her laugh lines. Sylvia’s smile grew too, until she was giggling herself as Joann wiped tears out of her eyes. “Honey, there’s a lot to harvesting, but you’ve got the core of it down. Do you want to know more?”

“Yeah,” Sylvia said, feeling a flush on the tips of her ears. “I would.”

* * *

Lieutenant Stamets ( _Paul_ , he kept trying to insist, but Sylvia had only been on _Discovery_ for two months; she didn’t want to step out of line) groaned and face-planted onto his desk. As that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, Sylvia kept working. Mostly, right now, that meant reading through files and plugging data into comparative statistical frameworks to see if she could find anything new and interesting about the spore drive.

It was intensely boring, and she really wished that she could do literally anything more exciting. She’d spent the first six weeks of this assignment reviewing every single inch of the spore drive, from blueprints to reality. She’d finished that, thrilled, but then Lt. Stamets had walked up to her station and made a motion as if he was dropping a pile of paper on her desk. Sylvia had stared at him, confused for a second, before her workstation lit up to show another butt-load of files. “Here’s the data from all our current trials,” Lt. Stamets had said, grinning at her. “I think something’s broken, or can’t handle the strain, or _something_. Please tell me what it is, Cadet Tilly.”

So she’d been stuck here, and the science and engineering were both _fascinating_ but she was also really, truly, incalculably _bored_.

Sylvia was about to follow Lt. Stamets’ example when the door to the spore wing (it wasn’t the spore bay, she’d been told many times; the spore bay was Lt. Stamets’ pet project and under the purview of botanists, not engineers) hissed open. Sylvia glanced over at it, under the cover of a stretch that started as a justification for looking and turned into something she hadn’t realised she’d needed. Lieutenant Commander Airiam stood there, silhouetted for a moment before the doors slid closed once more.

“Stamets,” Lt. Cmdr. Airiam said, and Lt. Stamets almost leapt to his feet. “Are you going to be ready to run another testing sequence in three days?”

“Three—” Lt. Stamets ran a hand through his hair, and the rest of the staff started turning to watch. “Airiam, we’re pushing too fast. We’ll run out of spores!”

Lt. Cmdr. Airiam inclined her head, and Sylvia thought she caught frustration in her expression. “ _I_ know that.”

“Fuck.” Lt. Stamets stared up at the ceiling. “Tilly!”

“Sir?” Sylvia said, startled to be singled out like this. 

Lt. Stamets gestured at the ceiling. “Is there some justification we can use to push back the next round of testing for at least a week? You’ve been sitting in all that data.”

“Um.” Sylvia bit her lip. “That weird side effect. The dampness? That we don’t know the cause of?” Lt. Stamets gestured at her to continue, and the words started tumbling out of her mouth. “I don’t know for sure, but it’s definitely not something the drive was designed for, and we’ve got a lot of delicate pieces, and I _know_ it takes a least a week to do a full cleaning inspection on something like this, but if mold—not spores, mold—starts growing on the regulators or water gets into the circuits, it’ll take a lot longer than a week to rebuild _everything_.”

“Well then!” Lt. Stamets threw both his hands out towards Sylvia, then drew them back into a hug. “You heard the cadet, Airiam. Can’t possibly do another trial until we go through and make sure that the dampness—which wasn’t something we designed the drive for, didn’t know about it at the time—isn’t leaking anywhere it shouldn’t.”

Lt. Cmdr. Airiam shook her head, but Sylvia could see her biting back a smile. “I’ll pass that on, Stamets.” Then she turned and gave a real smile to Sylvia. “And I’ll keep an eye out for you, Cadet Tilly; you’re clever, you think fast, and we have a friend—or two—in common.”

“Thank you,” Sylvia managed, feeling a little faint at the praise. Her ears were buzzing, she realised as Lt. Cmdr. Airiam took her leave. She took deep breaths, trying to calm herself enough to go back to work, and had almost succeeded when Lt. Stamets sat down on her desk.

“So, you’re brilliant,” he said, casually, as if this was something one heard every day. “You’re helping a lot, even if you don’t feel like you are, and I am really tired of formality. Especially formality I got because I’m being forced to serve on a military vessel.”

His eyes were piercing-bright, and Sylvia felt caught in them. Then the silence stretched out, and she said, cautiously, “Okay?”

“Better.” He patted her shoulder. “If you can’t call me Paul, could you at least drop the ‘lieutenant’?”

“I think so?” Sylvia smiled. It didn’t feel like a good smile to her, but Stamets’ grin made her think that it wasn’t so bad after all. “Should I keep going with this data?”

“Yeah, give me a summary of what you’ve figured out so far, even if it isn’t new.” Stamets hopped off the workstation and started walking backwards towards his own. “I’m making you double-check my work to make sure there’s no errors; anything new you figure out is a bonus.”

Sylvia saluted him, and got a single finger back in response. That was enough to startle her into laughter, and receive a thumbs-up back. In a much better mood, Sylvia turned back towards her data, ready to keep proving her skills.

* * *

“I’m not saying you have to enjoy every moment of it, but I’m saying that you should at least try to relax.” Joann led Sylvia through _Discovery_ ’s halls, winding deeper into the residential areas that Sylvia never had a reason to learn. “There’s more to life than work, no matter what fast-tracked colleges think.”

“I know that,” Sylvia grumbled, but she didn’t resist her friend’s lead. It wasn’t the idea of having fun that made her nervous, anyway; it was the fact that she was the only cadet in Joann’s group. Detmer and Airiam, who had made Sylvia promise to stop calling them by their rank as soon as she’d stuttered out nervous “Lieutenant”s in greeting despite how they were out of uniform, were also with them. “But I haven’t been here as long as you have.”

Detmer laughed. “Tilly, we didn’t get brought on that much before you did. We’ve just been in the service longer, so we know the tricks. It helps that we overlapped some in our own training, but that only does so much.” She slung an arm around Airiam’s shoulder. “It’s easier for some of us to settle in than others, y’know?”

Airiam shoved Detmer’s arm off. “I’ve settled in just fine, no thanks to _you_.”

Sylvia giggled, and stage-whispered to Joann, “They sound like sisters.”

Joann laughed outright, and so did Airiam and Detmer. Joann linked her arm through Sylvia’s and said, “We want you to feel just as comfortable, Sylvia. Otherwise, why would we take you along to secret girl-time hangouts?”

“Is that what this is?” Sylvia glanced around; she was in the middle of a triangle the other three were forming. “Are you a cult? Should I be worried?”

“The only cult here is the cult of liking to drink and grouse about work safely outside of any space we can be expected to be called on-duty.” Detmer patted Sylvia’s shoulder. “And if you don’t want to drink booze, you can drink fruit juice or soda and explain to us how superior it is, and we’ll probably agree with you. Sugar’s nice that way.”

Sylvia nodded, head whirling, as they stepped into an elevator and Airiam punched in their destination. Sylvia didn’t exactly catch it, but it was definitely somewhere on civilian levels—which explained why they’d gone so far; not all the elevators on _Discovery_ moved between explicitly Starfleet levels and the social spaces and general quarters of their support staff. “I think I’ll start with the juice, thanks.”

“I still don’t drink booze,” Airiam said, leaning against a wall. Sylvia had been trying to reconcile this quiet, friendly person with the stressed and sharply commanding officer she’d first met down in Engineering, but she thought she liked this Airiam better. “I don’t like how it interacts with the implants.”

“She’s just mad she’s a lightweight now,” Detmer said, completely unruffled. She tapped the metal shining against her shaved scalp. “I get tinglies from it; a much nicer side effect.”

Airiam responded with an upraised finger, and Sylvia leaned against Joann as she tried not to outright collapse with her giggles.

This was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. She took a deep breath as the giggles started to fade. As the elevator door slid open and they started walking again, Sylvia said, “Thank you.”

“For what?” Detmer asked, speeding ahead towards an area that sounded crowded. “Being friends?”

“Yeah,” Sylvia said, trying not to tear up. “I haven’t had many before.”

“Oh, honey,” Joann said, squeezing her arm. “I forgot to say. No big emotions like that until we’re safely at the bar. But then you can cry about it all you like, okay?”

Sylvia nodded, and let her new friends envelop her in their love as they continued onward into the night, and the new day, and all the rest of time after that.


End file.
